Iron is an essential element for nearly all living organisms and disruption of iron homeostasis can lead to a number of clinical manifestations. Iron is used in the formation of both hemoglobin and myoglobin, as well as numerous enzyme systems of the body. Disorders of iron in the body include iron deficiency anemia, anemia of inflammatory disease, and iron overload. This article reviews normal...

Approximately two billion people, mainly women and children, are iron deficient. Two studies examined the effects of iron deficiency and supplementation on rats. In study 1, mitochondrial functional parameters and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) damage were assayed in iron-deficient (< or =5 microg/day) and iron-normal (800 microg/day) rats and in both groups after daily high-iron supplementation (8,...

The biogenesis of iron-sulphur clusters requires the co-ordinated delivery of both iron and sulphur. It is now clear that sulphur in iron-sulphur clusters is derived from L-cysteine by cysteine desulphurases. However, the iron donor for the iron-sulphur cluster assembly still remains elusive. Our previous studies indicated that Escherichia coli IscA, a member of the iron-sulphur cluster assembl...

Transfer of iron from the mucosa is a critical step in dietary iron assimilation that is tightly regulated to ensure the appropriate amount of iron is absorbed to meet the body's demands. Too much iron is highly toxic, and failure to properly control intestinal iron export causes iron overload associated with hereditary forms of hemochromatosis. One form of genetic iron overload, ferroportin di...

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cause of cancer-related deaths in industrialized countries. Understanding the mechanisms of growth and progression of CRC is essential to improve treatment. Iron is an essential nutrient for cell growth. Iron overload caused by hereditary mutations or excess dietary iron uptake has been identified as a risk factor for CRC. Intestinal iron is tigh...

Mucosal uptake, mucosal transfer, and retention of a physiological dose of ferrous iron were studied in women with active rheumatoid arthritis (RA): 19 with normal and 17 with depleted bone marrow iron stores. Control subjects were 26 normal women and 20 women with uncomplicated iron deficiency. Iron absorption was measured with 59Fe as a tracer and by whole body counting. Compared with control...

The plant pathogen Agrobacterium tumefaciens encodes predicted iron-responsive regulators, Irr and RirA, that function in several other bacteria to control the response to environmental iron levels. Deletion mutations of irr and rirA, alone and in combination, were evaluated for their impact on cellular iron response. Growth was severely diminished in the Δirr mutant under iron-limiting conditi...

Standard approaches are not appropriate when assessing pharmacokinetics of iron supplements due to the ubiquity of endogenous iron, its compartmentalized sites of action, and the complexity of the iron metabolism. The primary site of action of iron is the erythrocyte, and, in contrast to conventional drugs, no drug-receptor interaction takes place. Notably, the process of erythropoiesis, i.e., ...

Regulation of intestinal iron absorption is crucial to maintain body iron levels because humans have no regulated iron-excretory system. Elucidating molecular events that mediate intestinal iron transport is thus important for the development of therapeutic approaches to modify iron absorption in pathological states. The process of iron uptake into duodenal enterocytes is relatively well unders...

In growing individuals, the requirement for absorbed iron consists of iron needed for growth and iron needed to replace inevitable iron loss. We were able to estimate inevitable iron loss by adolescents because total body iron of the adolescents had been enriched with the stable isotope, (58)Fe, as the result of earlier studies of iron absorption. During an interval beginning at least 1.56 y af...